Conference Time

Hi Everyone,
The conference started last night with a special meal for the honored guests. There were 6 of us with the Director of the Institute for Social Science Studies at U of Putra Malaysia and his assistant. The conference is held at the Marriott in Putrajaya; a very upscale area where the Prime Minister lives, the American Embassy is, the Supreme Court and all the legislative office buildings. I don't know that I have been in a hotel more grand than this one or bigger than this one. It has wide sweeping staircases, polished marble, beautiful flowers and gardens. We had a 9 course meal in the special, private restaurant for gourmet Chinese food. The shark fin soup was delicious.

The conference is a first and the UPM graduate students are running back and forth to the airport, hauling in boxes of program booklets, running around taking pictures, solving AV problems, etc. Sound familiar? The conference is titled, "The International Conference on Sustainable Community Development." There are 22 countries represented and Sharan Merriam and I are the only Americans. I presented a session on the progress of the Malaysian Breast Cancer project today. They have an interesting format - 5 papers are presented in 1 1/2 hour timeslots, so you get about 10-15 minutes to present and then 20 minutes for the whole group to answer questions. My session went well! Tomorrow I am presenting a keynote address on developing a plan for a community health education program. I am still polishing up my notes at midnight and will discuss using futures planning. John has been helping me with the wording and I could use some of you from WWU to help with this.

It is easy to become super critical of the program planning effort but I have to say, things seemed to go off without a hitch today but I saw a lot of happy, but tired students running around. So far we haven't had any soggy potato chips!

It is reassuring that so many are concerned about sustainable community development. There are quite a few here from Iran and one student has completed her dissertation on breast cancer research, so we will continue to network. The women wear the most beautiful silk dresses and men are all in suits. The Malaysians are very fond of ceremony and often march in a procession to start an event. This morning they marched in and sat in easy chairs lined up on the stage. We stood while the Malaysian national anthem played in a film and it was filled with images of flowers. The Universiti of Putra Malaysia had a wonderful film about their campus that must have played for 10 minutes. They are a very prominent agricultural school here and when I meet professors, many of them know where Bellingham is because they attended U of Oregon, UC Davis, Oregon State and some went to NC State and Florida State. The morning opening speaker was from Austrailia and he graduated from U of Wisconsin - Madison. So there are many, many links to the US.

The papers presented are all about research and one of the more interesting papers was a young man from Beruit who did a study about why college students there choose not to wear helmets when driving motorcycles. He had a number of bloody slides to show the results of not wearing one. This evening's banquet featured the director of one of Malaysia's charities who showed slides of where Malaysians go to help with disasters (apparently wherever there is a disaster, Malaysia send a team). Then he showed the work they do in Gaza and pretty soon we were watching bombs falling on Gaza, bodies, more bombing, etc. We were at a banquet waiting for our food and the film went on and on! I think most everyone was very surprised and not too hungry, especially those who had planned the conference. Malaysia is sending 40 doctors to Gaza soon.

The evening concluded with beautiful dancers and a special soup for desert. Sandy